The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn: review

The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn is a novel seduced by its own Scottishness, says Keith
Miller.

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The Scottish highlands are the scene for Kirsty Gunn's book, The Big Music.Photo: Alamy

By Keith Miller

10:27AM BST 22 Aug 2012

You don’t have to really, really like bagpipe music to enjoy or appreciate this novel; but it might help. Like some Renaissance rebus, it is, or purports to be, that which it describes: it’s organised and paced in accordance with the eponymous tradition of “Big Music”, or piobaireachd, in the Scottish Highlands – a tradition which is not on any account to be confused with the Little Music, eightsome reels and the Flowers of the Forest and all that.

It’s also a fairly classic piece of B S Johnson-style modernism, a bricolage of found texts, a dodgy dossier of narrative and contextual material, told in several different voices, set down in a studiedly erratic way, with footnotes, appendices, sheet music and little drawings.

It accumulates into a fractured family fable (the adjective applies to both nouns) recounting a series of events in an old, grey house in Sutherland, long used as a pipers’ academy.

These events reach a crescendo right at the start, as the elderly John Sutherland flees the house, having abducted the baby granddaughter of the housekeeper, his sometime lover, Margaret.

The plan seems to be that some sort of intersection between the potent human littleness of the baby and the vast sublimity of the Highland landscape will trigger a creative response whereby John will not so much be inspired to compose his final magnum opus as simply transcribe it from some immanent manifestation, a curdling or quickening into song of the wind as it slices through the heather, or something similar. But, of course, it’s not long before he is found, up on the hillside, in his little bothy, relieved of the still-warm infant and placed back on his medication.

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The rest of the book is largely dedicated to answering at least some of the questions posed by this scene (the ùrlar, or theme, of the piece, in Gunn’s conceit): family ties, filial discord, remembered passion – and a fair amount of bagpiping.

There is some lessening of the pace after an opening section that is energetic and evocative, and which makes an effort to rework all the tourist board clichés about the vast sublimity of the landscape in a fresh way. But it’s informative (much of the “documentary” material in the book would appear to be factual), and it’s all characterised by Gunn’s distinctive prose, cosseting and elaborate, and fully fit to be itself termed “musical”.

Walter Pater famously said that all art aspired to the condition of music – though it is unlikely he had bagpipes specifically in mind. Be that as it may, it’s a proclamation which resonated strongly with 20th-century abstract artists of the clan Kandinsky; it has occasionally been taken up as a challenge by writers.

However, while music is a useful metaphorical framework if you’re approaching, say, Finnegans Wake, I’m not sure it’s particularly germane to the works of Balzac or George Eliot. The novel does what music can’t: it tells you things. It also happens to you intimately, inside your head, at a place and time of your choosing; you enjoy certain freedoms that are not extended to consumers of other art forms.

There is something blustering about The Big Music, a bullying undercurrent to its insistence on the power of place. And there is something strange about so elaborate and distancing a methodology being set to work on a project which feels a little like being wrapped in an enforced embrace: the cerebral, experimental half and the flubbery, sentimental half of the book just don’t quite gel.

Plus it’s not only bagpipes you need a high tolerance for to get through the book without reaching for the Lagavulin (though you could always imagine Auld John is playing a dulcimer, a saxophone or a 1959 Fender Telecaster – that’s one of the freedoms enjoyed by the novel-reader). It’s the whole romantic nationalism thing.

Gunn, a New Zealander, may perhaps be forgiven for being seduced by the Highlands, and for seeing some essentialist relationship between that particular landscape, a particular tribe of people and a particular culture. She also points out that she received some support from Creative Scotland, the country’s equivalent of the Arts Council, during the book’s long gestation, so another Trainspotting was never on the cards. But substitute (say) “Kent”, “Morris dancing” and “white working-class Englishmen”, and you’re suddenly looking at something a lot less cuddly.